MAHA and Raw Milk Insanity
Food purity is impossible and seductive
In my twenties, I caught the vegan bug. My genetics — white, female, idealistic — made me susceptible.
I read Diet for a New America. I wanted to be a kind, loving nonconformist. Preferably, a thin one.
Then I stumbled across The McDougall Plan. Dr. McDougall had lived in Hawaii and observed that people of Japanese descent were healthier. He witnessed their kids and grandkids, however, becoming increasingly unhealthy.
Dr. McDougall noticed that older Japanese people ate mostly rice and vegetables, and some fish. This was likely due to a preference for a traditional diet as well as economic circumstances, as these were plantation workers on a budget. Had they been richer, they might have eaten more fish and probably more processed foods.
Their children added western foods (sugar, meats, white flour) to the diet. They were less healthy. Their grandchildren, who ate a mostly processed diet, were much more sickly.
Dr. McDougall concluded that diets based on rice and vegetables are healthy; diets based on animal products are unhealthy. He took this to the next level by declaring all fats unhealthy and exiling nuts, coconuts, and avocados from his diet.
Of course, we now know he was wrong. Olive oil and nuts are some of the healthiest foods on the planet.
Today, we have a resurgence of the food purity cult, and it’s called Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). Like a rash, it’s breaking out all over America.
I’m all for making America healthy, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about diet and health, it’s this: there are no easy answers.
I Was a Young, White, Female Idiot
The McDougall Plan became my bible. I ate nothing but whole grains, fruits, and vegetables for eight months. I lost weight! I had struggled with weight since childhood and had reached a whopping 165 pounds before starting the diet (I’m 5'4").
After six months, I weighed 130 pounds. Eureka — I’d found the cure for fatness.
Unfortunately, I also stopped getting my period. I got addicted to “whole grain” bagels with fake butter (remember Molly McButter?), and after a few months, I’d pivoted to everything bagels.
It turns out cooking 100% of your food is time-consuming.
In month eight, I developed mouth sores. I didn’t know what was causing them, but I figured my no-fat diet of mostly bagels, pasta, and vegan treats from the health food store wasn’t helping.
I learned a valuable lesson: don’t believe everything you read. It’s easy to come to a simple, straightforward, and deeply wrong conclusion based on limited data.
That’s why we have science.
Dr. McDougall didn’t run a randomized, controlled study. He rightly rejected the deeply flawed Western diet, but went too far.
After decades of self-experimentation and reading thousands of pages of text on nutrition, I’ve concluded that a perfect diet doesn’t exist.
I’ve discovered six principles to guide me whenever I decide to eat healthier.
1/ Eat Whole Foods
Industrialization has done a great disservice to mankind. Some people have gotten very rich, but nutritional deficiencies run rampant.
There are three culprits: white flour, sugar, and industrial oils. They are all the result of machinery that can crank out white bread, sweet treats, and bottled seed oils.
White flour, sugar, and processed oils (seed oils) are not healthy for human consumption. They could be categorized as slow poison because, by eating them, you remove their healthy counterparts from your diet.
If you are eating white bread, you don’t eat brown rice. If you eat margarine, you aren’t eating olive oil or butter, both of which have been proven to have nutrients that promote the absorption of key fat-soluble vitamins.
If you are eating concentrated sugar, fruit loses its luster.
2/ There Isn’t One Perfect Diet
Around the world, traditional cultures thrived on many different diets. Herding tribes like the Masai in northern Kenya and Tanzania traditionally consumed a simple diet of cow’s milk, cow’s blood, and small amounts of meat.
According to the classic Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, diets in “primitive” (indigenous) cultures varied greatly around the world. In 1934, Dr. Weston Price published a groundbreaking study of teeth and health in 14 different countries.
Accompanied by his wife Florence, Dr. Price traveled to five continents to compare health differences in people eating a traditional versus a “modern, western” diet. This could be called the original “blue zone” study.
When they visited the Outer Hebrides islands, they discovered the 20,000 residents of Lewis Isle consumed a diet of oats, fish, shellfish, and cod liver oil. In Oceania, the natives of Fiji ate fish and shellfish, roasted taro root, and a limited amount of green vegetables. Indigenous people in Canada hunted wild game all year and supplemented their diet with berries in summer. Tribes of British Columbia consumed seafood; tribes of the Yukon (with no access to seafood) ate organ meats to prevent disease.
Dr. Price concluded that certain fats — animal fats mainly, because he mostly studied hunter-gatherers — were critical to the absorption of key vitamins. He found that eating organ meats was common. For example, in Yukon, the tribes ate the adrenal gland of the moose to prevent scurvy.
Dr. Price’s studies were brilliant, but not all of his conclusions have held up. He did not travel to our modern “Blue Zones” of Ikaria, Greece, or Sardinia, Italy, for example, so he didn’t observe the health benefits of olive oil.
3/ The Holy Grail Is Made of Lead
The MAHA crowd wants to bring back raw milk, which contains some nutrients that pasturized milk doesn't. Unfortunately, large-scale consumption of raw milk would require a much more robust regulatory system than the US currently has (or has ever had).
It would be more practical to tax sugary sodas, tax vaping products, hire thousands more FDA inspectors, and label the worst offenders as “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs)— but we want simplicity. We want an elixir.
As humans, single solutions are very attractive. Complexity is hard for us to deal with, not to mention tiring.
The Bible is my recipe for Life!
Eat raw vegetables and fruits raw and you’ll never get sick!
Blueberries are the ultimate superfood!
This reductionist thinking (i.e., clickbait) feels satisfying because it saves us mental energy. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers in life.
4/ Genetics and Traditional Diets
It’s unlikely most of us would thrive on the Masai diet of cow’s milk, blood, and occasional beef. The Masai have been eating that way for millennia.
Humans adapt to diets over time, which is one reason Dr. Price found that traditional people ate different foods, yet all displayed the same remarkable health.
It’s also true that individuals come into the world with inherited health. My mother smoked and drank while pregnant with me (it was the 1960s), and that affects my health today. Other ancestors faced starvation, which impacts generations.
It’s not a bad idea to learn more about the traditional diet of your ancestors if you want to eat a healthier diet, while accepting that optimal health may not be in your genes.
5/ Protein, Fat, Ethics
The US system of meat processing is cruel, so becoming a vegetarian is ethically laudable. The problem is that humans have eaten animal products since the beginning of time.
You can buy all your organic, grass-fed meat from small ranches, but not everybody can afford that.
About 1% of humanity is vegan. Most of their community exists online, and it’s predominantly younger females. Vegans must take a supplement (B12) or risk non-reversible neurological damage.
Eating animal products isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. There are many ways to get protein and fat while minimizing suffering.
Eggs, fish, and cheese are convenient options.
If Dr. Price’s research can teach us anything, it’s that a nutrient-dense diet can be achieved by eating breads and dairy products (as in Switzerland), seafood (all islanders), or insects (Aboriginals).
6/ Extreme Diets Are Impossible to Maintain
While 1% of humanity is vegan, it’s likely many of them are vegan for a few years, at most. Staying on a highly restrictive diet that is out of step with cultural norms feels isolating.
It’s inconvenient, your spouse and family may not support you, and finding and cooking special foods is time-consuming.
I’ve been vegan, vegetarian, and carnivore. The longest I stuck with any of those was one year and four months. I’m retired, have enough resources, know how to cook, and have a supportive spouse — and still, it was impossible to maintain a radical diet.
On the carnivore diet, I didn’t love eating liver a few times a week, but social limitations were a much bigger problem. Almost everyone I knew who ate a “carnivore” diet was part of an online tribe.
Cultural and social aspects are an essential part of eating. Having meals together bonds us to other people. Biologists argue that humans may be one of the few mammals that are “eusocial”, meaning our social organization is critical to our survival. We are highly motivated by social rituals and averse to conflict and isolation. (Ants, bees, wasps, termites, and naked mole rats are some of the other eusocial species).
MAHA: Seeking a Utopia That Never Was
Dr. Price’s book includes photographs of healthy “natives” with wide smiles, straight and white teeth, wide dental arches, no cavities, and impressive physiques. His data revealed that a poor diet led to nutritional deficiencies that corresponded to less attractive and less healthy individuals.
Can we go back in time? No, but we can learn some lessons from the so-called “primitives.”
MAHA wants to return to a time when everyone had perfect health. Even in the tribes Dr. Price studied, cavities existed. The rates were lower — much lower — than found in “civilized” people, yet perfect health isn’t possible.
Perfect health and diet purity sound great in theory, but obvious problems come up with policymaking in large, industrialized nations.
Who is going to police the American food industry, which preys on children, rural people, and the less educated?
Who will stop/regulate the production and sale of sugar, including foods made with High Fructose Corn Syrup?
How many of us are willing to die from Covid because of vaccine skepticism?
Third — you get the picture.
I am all for fixing nutritional deficiencies, but until we can regulate and control predatory corporations that rake in profits by addicting children to sugar, we won’t get far.
Nobody thinks RFK Jr. and Donald “KFC” Trump are going to regulate the wealthy, and Big Food is one of the wealthiest sectors of our economy.
On the other hand, I sympathize with the goals of MAHA. I’d love to see a healthy America. I don’t agree that raw milk is the answer.
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If you like my stories, check out my young adult novel Down and Out on the Road South, published in 2023 with Wings ePress.
I am based in Hot Springs, Arkansas. I’ve been writing humor, personal essays, and poetry on Medium for four years. The first three chapters of my second book, Same Flood Twice, are free on Substack.
